]]>Quantum added cloud services and file sync and share technology through its acquisition of Symform last week. The interesting part will be to see how it implements these technologies with its current archiving and backup products.

Symform claims 45,000 customers use its services, mostly consumers and prosumers who pool their own hardware to form a cloud. Symform said its cloud includes petabytes of storage and billions of data objects under management. Quantum will continue that service, but is more interested in the platform and technology than the pure sync and share business.

Janae Lee, Quantum’s senior vice president of strategy, said Quantum will expand the technology to fit its enterprise business model.

“Clearly, that’s not the way we would run that type of service in the markets we participate in,” she said of Symform’s consumer and prosumer model. “This is a platform and technology acquisition. We’ll adhere to what they’ve done but monetize it in a more traditional business-to-business way.”

Quantum did not disclose the purchase price, but said it is hiring Symform’s development team including the startup’s founder and CTO Bassam Tabbara.

The Quantum news release about the deal said the Symform technology will augment Quantum’s Q-Cloud data protection service and the nearline private cloud offerings that are part of its StoreNext and Lattus platforms.

Lee said the deal does not mean Quantum is looking to compete with public clouds such as Amazon or with file sync and share vendors such as Dropbox and Box.

“We don’t want to compete with Amazon. That’s not a winning model,” she said.

As for file sharing, she said, “that’s becoming a pretty populated market. Everybody’s having one now. As a standalone business, that would be a difficult market to penetrate. It needs to be part of a larger solution. We can package these technologies together [with current Quantum products].”

She added that Quantum customers have expressed interest in hybrid and private clouds as well as application services.

“We can take this technology that’s been proven in a public cloud and apply it as a private cloud model,” Lee said. “We can go to a large enterprise customer and say, ‘Hey, this has worked with 45,000 end points.’”